Author here, this was the last of four cryptograms from #35 of Klaus Schmeh’s list of 50 unsolved cryptograms. The first 3 were cracked in 1948, 1996 and 2019 with the last one remaining uncracked for 76 years. Wood initially set up the cipher to try to prove he could pass the key through a medium after his death.

The key ended up being the Lord's Prayer from a 1912 German Bible. The message reads Hier bin ich. Totsiens. T.E.W. "Here I am" in German, "goodbye" in Afrikaans, with Wood's initials.

Since the release of Fable I’ve been using Claude and OpenAI to try to tackle these open problems, Opus 5.5 wrote the search code and identified the books to use for the key phrase and Astra verified the results. All the code and results related to the search are up on GitHub - https://github.com/creilly11235/wood-cryptogram-1950

Klaus has confirmed the results here - https://klausschmeh.net/woods-cryptogram-from-the-crypt-anot...

So we now have evidence that AI absorbs the souls of dead people.

So either there is no life after death or there are ghosts in Claude

So he proved there is life after death. He sent the key 76 years later, just had to help invent chatbots first

a beautiful (static?) website for showcasing a beautiful cipher

excellent work on both fronts (solving, and showcasing)

while he failed to demonstrate that the spirits of men continue to exercise control over this realm (after all, is it not Satan who presently rules this world?), he left something beautiful and interesting that genuinely took a while to solve considering how close it was to the computing revolution